"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Wernher von Braun

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Research

My Research in Brief

The enormous potential of cloud computing for improved and cost-effective service has generated unprecedented interest in its adoption. However, a potential cloud user faces numerous risks regarding service requirements, cost implications of failure and uncertainty about cloud providers’ ability to meet service level agreements. These risks hinder the adoption of cloud.

We motivate the need for a new requirements engineering methodology for systematically helping businesses and users to adopt cloud services and for mitigating risks in such transition. The methodology is grounded in goal oriented approaches for requirements engineering. We argue that Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) is a promising paradigm to adopt for goals that are generic and flexible statements of users’ requirements, which could be refined, elaborated, negotiated, mitigated for risks and analysed for economics considerations. The methodology can be used by small to large scale organisations to inform crucial decisions related to cloud adoption.

We propose a risk management framework based on the principle of GORE. In this approach, we liken risks to obstacles encountered while realising cloud user goals, therefore proposing cloud-specific obstacle resolution tactics for mitigating identified risks. The proposed framework shows benefits by providing a principled engineering approach to cloud adoption and empowering stakeholders with tactics for resolving risks when adopting the cloud.

We extend the work on (GORE) and obstacles for informing the adoption process. We argue that obstacles prioritisation and their resolution is core to mitigating risks in the adoption process. We propose a novel systematic method for prioritising obstacles and their resolution tactics using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). To assess the AHP choice of the resolution tactics we support the method by stability and sensitivity analysis.

S.Zardari, F. Faniyi, R. Bahsoon (2012). Using Obstacles for Systematically Modelling, Analysing and Mitigating Risks in Cloud Adoption.In the book on Aligning Enterprise, System and Software Architectures.PDF

S.Zardari and R.Bahsoon (2011). Cloud Adoption: A Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering Approach.In the Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Cloud Software Engineering, the ACM/IEEE 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Hawaii, USA.PDF